Jack Powers

INFORMAL BIO What a great time to be alive! My roots are in the printing and
publishing business: I've worked as a newspaper reporter, a magazine writer and columnist, a
programmer, a college teacher, a publisher and a video producer. I've written five books, sold print
advertising and typesetting computers, developed one of the earliest on-line service
bureaus, and worked on the first computerized Yellow Pages here in New York.

When I took a hard look at the future of media and communications technologies in
1982 (about seven months after the first IBM PC and a couple of years before the original
Macintosh), I was excited by the promise of the emerging digital revolution and struck by
the gap between what new technologies can do versus our ability to understand and apply them
effectively. The best thing I could think to do was start a research shop that would study
the evolution of communications in all of its developing forms and that could help people
use the new tools to make better media. I pulled together a team of specialists in the key
areas and started the Graphics Research Laboratory, precursor to the International
Informatics Institute, in October 1982.

BEFORE DTP

For the first four or five years, we simply helped people use computers to make print,
half the time consulting and half the time teaching seminars and workshops. I remember
some early seminars about whether the new IBM PC-DOS operating system would replace the
tried-and-true CP/M. I taught magazine and book publishers about word processing,
introduced typographers to computerized composition, and argued with art directors that
four-color illustrations could someday be done on a computer. We analyzed the Star
workstation for Xerox (the one that Apple used as the basis for the Lisa), created
corporate electronic publishing strategies, helped magazine companies buy their first
computer systems and designed techniques that let government publishers automatically
generate mountains of paperwork from databased information.

THE DESKTOP REVOLUTION

Starting in 1985, we began showing people how to use computers to make cheaper and
faster print. I did the sales training at the launch of desktop publishing for
Apple's national accounts reps and worked with Agfa, AT&T, IBM, Linotype and Xerox on
the development of desktop markets and technologies. For the next six years, we helped
some of the smartest publishers in the world take control of their production technology,
closing the gap "from brain to mouse to press." We worked with commercial
publishers, corporate communications departments and government agencies on four
continents to automate text, images and design and to make the best use of the many new
ways to produce print.

BEYOND PRINT

In the early 90s, the focus changed. Gradually everyone wanted to know how to use
computers to make less print, more effective communications. It started in the technical documentation world
with high speed laser printing systems customizing publications on demand. Then government
agencies began dumping huge data files to optical disks. And now every media company in
every industry segment is working on multimedia, CD-ROMs, demand printing, online
databases and the World Wide Web. We analyzed and brainstormed the evolution of new media
for organizations like John Wiley & Co., Salomon Brothers, American Express,
MasterCard and the CIA, and we started writing about interactive communications in the
first, paper editions of our web site called Electric-Pages.

To think through these changes in media focus, I
taught a course called
"Interactive Multimedia" at New York University's Center for Advanced Digital
Applications open to credit and non-credit students. You never learn more about something
than when you try to teach it, and the classes at NYU have helped me develop a better
understanding on the move from batch to interactive communications.

THE INTERNET

In February of 1994 I gave my first seminar in Oslo about the Mosaic browser and the World Wide
Web, and by the middle of 1995 almost all of our research and consulting work was
Internet-related. From its media industry beginnings in publishing shops and advertising
agencies, the Internet exploded into the consciousness of every business and
most homes throughout the developed world.

In February 1997 Mecklermedia put me in charge of developing the curriculum for the INTERNET WORLD conferences, the biggest Internet business conferences in the world. Trying
to imagine where the Internet would be six to nine months ahead was a great challenge,
and working with the brilliant INTERNET WORLD faculty here and abroad gave me a
fabulous perspective on the digital world we're building. After INTERNET
WORLD,
I developed new conferences for Jupitermedia (Enterprise IT), IDT Group
(Outsourcing), Rowland Court Media (Digital Photography) and Diversified
Communications (disruptive healthcare innovations).

Continuing the graphic communications revolution, the turn of the 21st
century developments in flat panel displays, digital imaging and mobile
computing are transforming our visual environment once again. Video is
breaking free of the TV sets in our living rooms and finding new forms on
our office PCs, in mobile phones, pocket computers, car dashboards,
advertising billboards and retail store signs. In January 2005, we started
the Pervasive.TV Project to study
the commercial, creative and culture importance of video everywhere.

The
digitized, globalized, customized, automated, outsourced consumer economy we
expect needs more than the hide-bound healthcare oligarchy of doctors'
guilds, hospitals, insurance companies, medical device manufacturers and Big
Pharma can provide. I originally come at the subject from the informatics
angle: artificial intelligence, wearable biosensors, ubiquitous networking
are slowly being adapted to medical applications. But as the inefficiencies,
conflicts of interest, demographic pressures and rotten customer service get
more egregious, society will demand that healthcare industries enter the
21st Century. (See my video podcast "Healthcare
Insurrection: Medicine, Money and Expectations" for a six minute
rant.)

THE INSTITUTE

In 1998 when we broadened the scope of the Graphics Research Laboratory to include all
communications technology-driven businesses, we re-launched it as the International Informatics
Institute, IN3.ORG. In commerce, we're looking at how
different companies, countries and cultures are adopting high technology; in infrastructure we're
learning as much as possible about "ubiquitous IP" and Internet appliances that
connect everything from factories and offices to TVs, air conditioning systems and automobiles. Since 1978 I estimate that I've given more than 1,500 seminars to some 250,000
people around the world. I've been translated into Japanese, Chinese, French, German,
Arabic, Italian, Portuguese, Spanish and Norwegian, and I expect the latest developments will reach an even wider range of people.

I grew up in my father's small printing company in New Jersey, pulling
letterpress proofs and running a Multilith offset press at age 10, setting type (for a
penny a line) on an ancient Linotype machine by the time I was 12. I still type that way,
with my left hand over the "e" and my right hand roaming the keyboard.

While I was still in
high school, I started working for small newspapers just at the time
when Compugraphic was selling cheap photocomposition computers to small publishers.
Although I wanted to be a journalist, I was the only one who knew anything about printing,
so I wound up on the production side most of the time. (It occurred to me recently that
from those early days behind a Compugraphic 4961TL in 1972, I've never had a job in
which I didn't use a computer every day.)

The 70s were a great time for publishing technology and I worked in dozens of places as
an advertising typographer, a computer systems manager, an in-house technology trainer, a
salesman and a composition programmer. I went from hot metal to paper tape to OCR to
8-inch then 5.25-inch floppy disks.

By the Spring of 1982, I was vice president for new business development for Expertype,
the biggest typesetting company in New York. I had spun off a few companies while there: a
sales and marketing operation that sold the Computer Composition International typesetting
computers we used and an on-line services subsidiary that was doing database publishing
and taking page files over the phone--often at 300 baud, sometimes through
ArpaNet---before anyone ever heard of digital prepress and PostScript. In June I wrote a five year strategic
plan for the future of the graphic arts business in New York; the next day I started
my own research business on the premise that it would be easier to think, write and talk about the great changes happening in
technology, business and society than to get caught in them.